By Joe Berk
Man, there is a lot of spam and there sure are a lot of malign actors floating around on the Internet. It’s picked up in recent weeks. I’m not sure why.
WordPress, the blog hosting software we use, does a pretty good job of dumping spam comments in its trash folder. We had to tell it what to look for, which was fairly easy. If a comment has a link in it, or any Cyrillic alphabet characters, or a .ru in its email address, it goes straight to spam. I guess Russians are bad actors. It seems like they are more into this than any other nationality. I asked Google why we were getting so many spam comments, and here’s what it came back with:
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- SEO Link Building: Spammers want backlinks (incoming links pointing to their sites) to artificially boost their rankings in search engines.Automated
- Scripts: They do not target you personally. Instead, they use scripts and bought bot networks that blast thousands of blogs at the same time.
- Targeting Older Posts: Bots frequently target older blog posts that you no longer monitor closely.
- The Numbers Game: On an unprotected blog, automated bots can make up over 75% of all incoming comment traffic.
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Like I said, the WordPress software does a pretty good job of sending this crap directly into the trash folder, but every once in a while, a legit comment gets dumped there, too. Most days I look at the trash comments and restore the odd one or two that shouldn’t be there, but lately we’ve been getting upwards of a hundred or more spam comments daily. I don’t go through all of those as they tend to be lengthy (as in hundreds of words each). I simply click on the “empty trash” button and they all go away for good. If you’ve made a comment and it didn’t make it to our blog, my apologies; I inadvertently poured out the baby with the bathwater. Make it again and I’ll make sure it gets posted.
The other form of spam comes via email, and that’s gone up sharply, too. It’s probably increased by a factor of four or five recently. I block and trash the spam emails when the new ones appear, but I fear I’m fighting a losing battle. It’s those damn Russians again, I think. I almost miss the Nigerian princes who needed my help to dispose of their hundreds of millions of inherited dollars. I guess they gave up on that con and turned their attention to running “Learing” Centers in Minnesota. I know, that’s the Somalians. But you get the idea. Russians. Nigerians. Somalians. It never ends.
It would be nice if running a blog only involved taking cool pictures and writing. Spam management is now a big part of the job. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is.